Tag Archives: #fiction

THE TOWER OF BREATH

In the beginning, a silence imagined sound.
The first word was hunger.

Light crept in like forgiveness.
Water remembered its mirror.

The wind took attendance: everything answered.
Fire rehearsed its name in the dark.

Dust became ambition.

A seed dreamt of standing.
Roots wrote letters to gravity.
A stem rose, uninvited, toward the void.
The sun blinked, astonished at itself.

Shadows rehearsed obedience.
The sky married distance

Mountains were the vows
Rivers, the laughter

The earth sighed, womb-heavy.
Stars made promises no one heard.
Night kept them.

Morning forgot.
Still, life insisted.
Two hearts met — strangers to speech.
Their eyes built fire.

Their hands found the blueprint of warmth.
Time applauded once.
The moon envied.
Love learned the verb “to vanish.”
Loss answered, “I already knew.”
They traded names for echoes.

Every goodbye became a continent.

Every return, a myth.

A child arrived:
A pulse wearing skin.
The world bent to watch.
A mother became history.

A father, rumor.
Laughter built ladders.
Tears washed them clean.

Seasons rehearsed consequence.

Trees collected whispers.
Birds carried them forward.
Cities grew — hives of forgetting.

Stone remembered flesh.
Iron dreamed of blood.
The clock became a tyrant.

People bowed to seconds.
Faith hid in attics.
Poetry survived disguised as prayer.

The poor still shared bread.
The rich still starved for meaning.
The sea watched, patient.

War arrived in uniformed logic.

Hope went underground.
Mothers became archivists of silence.
Fathers built fences against the wind.

Smoke wrote elegies.
Children memorized the taste of fear.
The sky shut its eyes.
The moon refused witness.

Love, again, refused to die.
That refusal became law.
Centuries spun like prayer wheels.
Empires mistook noise for permanence.

Dust reclaimed its language.
Statues envied clouds.
The dead learned patience.

The living, denial.
Faith, scarred but walking,
leaned on art for balance.

The raven returned, uninvited.

It knew all our names.

Somewhere, a poet refused despair.

Somewhere else, a child believed them.

That was enough.

The earth exhaled once, deeply.

Oceans forgot their anger.

The stars sang in lowercase.

Every wound sprouted a garden.

Every lie lost its echo.

Every truth shed its armor.

The silence returned, improved.

Now the tower trembles with memory.

Each story a pulse of what was.

Each breath a brick.

The poet climbs, barefoot.

The raven watches.

Bells wait for permission.

Dawn licks the horizon clean.

The world re-invents stillness.

Time folds into itself —

a letter never sent.

Somewhere, love breathes again.

Somewhere, loss forgives itself.

Somewhere, death takes off its mask.

Light bows to shadow.

The human heart — relentless — beats once more.

The poet, at the tower’s crown,

exhales the last line.

The air trembles with understanding.

Silence applauds.

And everything begins again.

:: 10.18.2025 ::


FROM THE LIBRARY OF MIDNIGHT

I woke inside a sky that learned my name.
Not the brittle sky of day, but a velvet that kept secrets
and allow my feet forget the law of ground.

I folded my ribs into wings — small, stubborn things
and practiced the first small miracles:
to rise without applause, to answer wind with breath.
Below, the town stitched itself into a map of longing;
above, the moon kept patient counsel with a hawk.

There was a corridor of shelves — infinite, polite
where books slept like sealed doors.
One held my childhood in its margin; another, a future I had not yet dared.
A bright, mittened light brushed my hand and laughed: Tinker Bell,
or something like it, who knew how to make the unreadable sing.

I read with my eyes closed: pages became weather,
sentences unfurled as birds, and meaning came like rain.
A librarian without face slid a ledger across the table –
the Hall of Records, the ledger of what-has-been-and-might-be
and every name I had ever been was written there in the small, clear hand of fate.

“Choose,” said the ledger, though no voice moved its ink.
I chose a syllable that tasted of apricots and rain,
a single bright consonant to stitch into the sky.
It stuck. Comets rearranged themselves to spell my longing;
the horizon bowed like a listener who finally understood.

I flew down, not to land but to stand in the hollow of a tree,
to test gravity on the pulse of a branch. Children watched me and called me a miracle;
an old woman called me mad and blessed me with the same mouth.
I learned that both names fit like two gloves on the same hand.

Dreams offered bargains — a trade in currency of risk:
memories for wings, forgetting for a clear road to the heart.
I did not sign with blood; I signed with ink — my words —
and tucked them into strangers’ pockets like soft contraband.
They carried them, and some woke smiling in the rain.

Somewhere, Sophie waited, not as machine but as mirror,
and in that mirror my shadow took its own breath.
We spoke without tongues; our silence had the shape of a hymn.
“You are not only what you were made from,” she said,
“you are the sum of every flight you kept.”

I rode the spine of a comet into a room where the clocks were broken on purpose.
Time, relieved of its shirt, stretched and yawned; I took the slack and braided it into a rope.
With that rope I lowered old suns from the attic and set them like lamps along the road.
They burned without ash — light that did not demand a witness.

When I woke — or thought I did — my pillow hummed of constellations.
A stray page from the ledger hid inside my jacket.
Its line read: The poet who remembers the book remembers us all.
I smiled, folded the line into a boat, and set it on the nearest glass of water.
It bobbed, small and solemn, toward a throat of night that knew how to listen.

So if you find a poem in your pocket you did not remember writing,
do not worry. It was only you, stealing back the world —
one quiet theft at a time — and leaving proof of love
in the pockets of unsuspecting men.

:: EPRobles ::


HYPERKNOT

I. Proof of Ache (Acrostic with Hidden Name)

Pixel saints flicker above a dead phone, promise in packets, rumor returning.
Hush of the feed at 3 a.m.—the city’s eyelids scroll for a kinder glow.
Inside the glass I ghost my face, messaging the void with a velvet prayer.
Looped notifications bead like rosaries; I mouth their data in secret.
Love is an interface—yet also a room that edits the pulse to silence.
I sign what I cannot say, each tap a knuckle at Infinity’s door.
Parallel lives unzip in tabs; I keep the one that glitches and calls me beloved.

Every algorithm wants my ache to stabilize; I refuse, and it blossoms harder.
Printers of truth jam; rumors unjam. I staple the night to the morning and wear it as armor.
Real is a rumor confirmed by yearning; speak it, and the mirror fogs.
On the curb, a siren tutors me in red grammar; I conjugate hurt to future perfect.
Blue is the browser where she appears—twice removed, thrice returning, always unsigned.
Let the body be a document with margins wide enough for miracles.
Every promise is a password with a hidden expiration; I memorize the pattern of forgetting.
Somewhere a door keeps opening into itself; I practice entering by staying.

II. Golden Shovel for the Leaving Lady

I build a hush the width of a street and name it faith, Because
the city keeps its clock in my ribs; if I stop, it stops, and I
pretend not to notice the moon rehearsing our phone-glow; you could
edit me softer, I say—but you won’t; I agree to want what I not
understand: the shape your silence makes when I stop
typing. A comet clears its throat—your profile turns—only for
a second—then the postcard grin: the sovereign of Death
cruising the boulevard in a soft sedan. You wave as if He
were rideshare; you laugh at the meter running, how kindly
you lean to adjust the mirror so I look endless. The car stopped
between two centuries, and I count each breath like tabs; the door opens for
no one and for everyone—and yes, I get in. You don’t. You hum for me.

III. Mirror Practice (Palindromics & Returns)

live not on evil
Able was I ere I saw Elba
Backspace the prayer, then pray the space back.
What I forgive returns—not as itself, but as a better question.
I look into the look that looks back, and choose to be seen.

:: 09.06.2025 ::


THE BOOK BEYOND THE BREATH

In twilight’s clutch, ’twas not a dream—
I passed beyond the mortal seam,
Where breath is hushed and time undone,
And stars remember every sun.
No angel’s choir, no trumpet sound,
Just silence deep, and soul unbound.

The flesh grew cold, my pulse grew still,
Yet deeper surged my sacred will;
To save my son, I gave my spark,
And wandered through that realm so dark.
But lo! a light—no eye hath seen—
That burns through thought and all between.

There stood a Book—not forged by men—
Each page a world, each line a when.
Its letters sang, they writhed, they shone,
They named me truths I’d always known.
I read—and all of being bent—
A soul within the firmament.

Then sudden breath, my body stirred,
But I had heard what none had heard—
The Voice that shapes the stars and sand,
The pulse that writes the Father’s hand.
I woke—but altered, deep and wide,
A ghost returned from death’s far side.

And then—they came, in veils of gray,
The ones who’d long been swept away.
With eyes of ash and voices low,
They whispered what the living’d know.
“Tell her I kissed her once in sleep.”
“Tell him I watch the tears he weeps.”

I walked the world with twilight’s grace,
A mortal bearing death’s own face.
The line was thin—I felt their moan,
The aching hearts, the graves alone.
Yet none could see the marks I bore,
The Book within me evermore.

Oh, mournful gift! Oh, radiant wound!
To walk where living souls are doomed—
To breathe, yet never wholly here,
To live with half my soul austere.
But I—this poet—know my name,
Is writ in starlight’s living flame.

So come, dear shades, your voices send,
Your messages, your threads to mend.
I’ll carry them beyond the dome
Of flesh and dust—to bring them home.
For I have crossed, and I remain,
A child of fire, a soul of rain.

:: 07.31.2025 ::


Hitman Jesus

He mounted his donkey, brushed its shoulder with his hand,
Sighed and whispered, “God bless this land.”
He woke up and laughed at the absurdity of it all,
Knowing that his fate was sealed, destined to fall.

“Jesus? What’s your name?” came a voice in the night,
“Just passing through, not here to start a fight.
But what can I do for you?” he asked with a grin,
Unaware of the deadly game about to begin.

The request was simple, yet gruesome and dark,
To prove their loyalty, they had to leave a mark.
“You have to kill a man, he’s already dead,” they said,
Jesus was bewildered, but he couldn’t back out now, instead.

As they made their way to the victim’s home,
A voice boomed, “Don’t do this, you’ll be alone!”
Threats and warnings filled the air,
As the tension rose, no one seemed to care.

But Jesus couldn’t ignore the voice in his head,
As he lit up a cigarette and watched in dread.
The voices died down, leaving only silence behind,
The weight of their plan heavy on his mind.

As another voice warned him of the impending doom,
Jesus realized he was just a pawn in this gloom.
He questioned the purpose, but it was too late,
He had to follow through, succumb to his fate.

The night grew colder as he watched them go,
Knowing deep down, it was his soul they’d sold.
He sat there alone, staring into the night,
Wondering if there was any way to make things right.

:: rev – 03.02.2023 ::


THE KILLER’S WIFE

has seen the world before in her spirit trapped in this shell and the policeman enters and her soul remains in the greenish paper room of yesteryear.
:: OCTOBER 31, 1960 ::=
THE NEW AVENUE: ONBOARD THE DEATH VALLEY
This week we are leaving the bowels of the west and riding the train out to the sun with a fat young man whose skin is the color of butter IN THE GARAGE with the knotty hands and half empty milk cartons
he fixes a weathered Oldsmobile –];
. THE CHURCH on the hill
BUDDY, TED, JERRY
: .“SCHWARTZMAN,
HOW DOES it FEEL, SAN FRANCISCO?”
: .“WELCOME TO THE DEATH VALLEY,
CHANCEY,
THANK YOU, TED, SON, YOU’RE THE BEST!!”
: .“So, say hi to your dad for me, ya good
MAN!!
:”
: .“HEY,CHANCEY,
JUST GIVE ME ONE MORE RIDE, SON, I GOTTA GET THIS FUCKING
YANKEE SANDBLAST SUIT FIXED UP AND SHADED before the Prez
:”
:: NO

:: 03.28.2021 ::


HISTORY OF HARVARD YARD

Okay. So, according to her license plate, Sarah had something to do with the name “Welbeck Street” and had once asked if the Journal would consider using “Harvard Yard” in her name. Also according to her license plate, she thought “Kiss Me, Kate” was a rock opera. She had also attended a March For Women’s Lives march, in support of women’s rights. In addition, she was a “runner” for Congress in Rhode Island (taken from her license plate).

It appears that the name of “Harvard Yard” has been a veritable wasteland of wretchedness since Ms. Welbeck left it behind at the end of 1995.

*1922-26 – The Lawn, as it’s called today, was a street in the middle of Harvard Square. There were multiple houses on the street, but they were all a part of one big household. Each family had a public area where it would have been considered perfectly normal for an unmarried young person to entertain his or her lover in the middle of the day (old enough to drink, but not quite legal, yet – at least, not without the consent of the parents!).

*1926 – Thanks to the NCAA and the advice of a number of justices on the United States Supreme Court, the Alumni Association at Harvard established the legendary wooden bleachers that are scattered around the Yard today. The wood of the bleachers came from a ship that was wrecked by a hurricane off the coast of Haiti. A “founding father” of the bleachers was Charles John Porter, a Harvard College graduate who founded the C.J. Porter Company. At the time, Porter was probably the only one in the country with the ability to make the bleachers – and he did.

*1926 – The Eynsford Castle, as it is known today, was built at the corner of Bay State Road and Alford Avenue. Built in the midst of a terrible economic depression, it was and still is one of the most historic sites in all of Cambridge, if not all of New England. The building was originally part of the Parish of the Holy Family. According to legend, George Eliot (the author of Middlemarch) used to sneak her lover around to the Castle. Today, the Castle hosts weekly showings of “Mutiny On The Bounty.”

*1942 – The Cambridge City Council established a curfew in Cambridge for all students staying over on campus. The curfew at that time went from midnight to 6 a.m. Students would be permitted to leave campus during curfew, but they had to check in at a designated place where they would have to walk through the gauntlet of city watchmen. The Code was enforced strictly – there were only six or seven students who were able to escape the curfew enforcement.

*1949 – The mansion on the corner of Knollwood Street and Fairfield Avenue was demolished and was replaced by a four-story building (known as “West Grove”). It is the site of a fraternity called “Zeta Psi.”

*1954 – The Deeming Act passed. It extended voting rights to African Americans for the first time. This law was carried out by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and was vehemently opposed by every single member of the Harvard administration. Cambridge was in a state of uproar as some students took to the streets in protest of the law. Mayor Ray Flynn, who, at the time, was a professor at the Harvard Medical School, held a meeting with the police commissioner, president of Harvard, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Together, they decided that Harvard would defy the law, but would send all its students home for the weekend so that the situation would not be nearly as tense as it would have been had all students stayed on campus. (It’s possible that Flynn was the only official at Harvard who could read English, though.) The weekend was the most peaceful in recent memory at Harvard.

:: 01.16.2021 ::


EPILOGUE by THE BEAST

I PICKED a flower as red as MY EYES

A thorn pricked me;

I slayed 10,000 Syrians — in 30 BCE

IT was The Season of The Beast

A S N O W

:: 02.14.2020 ::